fourth generation language

An "application specific" language. The term was invented by

Jim Martin to refer to non-procedural {high level language}s

built around {database} systems. The first three generations

were developed fairly quickly, but it was still frustrating,

slow, and error prone to program computers, leading to the

first "programming crisis", in which the amount of work that

might be assigned to programmers greatly exceeded the amount

of programmer time available to do it. Meanwhile, a lot of

experience was gathered in certain areas, and it became clear

that certain applications could be generalised by adding

limited programming languages to them. Thus were born

report-generator languages, which were fed a description of

the data format and the report to generate and turned that

into a {COBOL} (or other language) program which actually

contained the commands to read and process the data and place

the results on the page.

Some other successful 4th-generation languages are: {database

query language}s, e.g. {SQL}; {Focus}, {Metafont},

{PostScript}, {RPG-II}, {S}, {IDL-PV/WAVE}, {Gauss},

{Mathematica} and {data-stream language}s such as {AVS},

{APE}, {Iris Explorer}.